Martin Henry

SLAVERY CONTINUES. Even as the world, led by the United Nations (U.N.), commemorates the 200th anniversary of the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in Africans, millions are held in bondage.

Monday's Gleaner ran the international horror story from the Associated Press, 'Slave labourers set free'. "Over 500 slave labourers have been freed in China in a month, the latest case being yesterday (Sunday, June 17) when police caught a man accused of starving and beating workers to keep them enslaved at brick kilns," the report said.

While closed regimes and isolated states and regions are particularly hospitable, forced labour is present all over the world, from North African Mauritania to the North American United States. China's Communist Party officials are said to be in league with the kiln owners for slavery. Niger, where servitude is rampant, only officially criminalised slavery, under international pressure, in 2003, with weak enforcement.

Lord Wilberforce, a descendant of the original abolitionist William Wilberforce, when he was a joint president of the London-based Anti-Slavery Society (now Anti-Slavery International) two decades ago wrote that the problem of slavery in the 20th century was then as great, indeed greater than it was in the 1830s.

The modern Wilberforce estimated in 1986 that some 100 million people worldwide were subject to servitude. That is five times or more the total number of African slaves in the whole of the Americas before emancipation began in the 19th century, and more than the total number of slaves in that world of slavery but which, of course, had a smaller population.

Will it ever end?

With the dismantling of the gulags of communism, the numbers in state servitude would have fallen, but millions remain in various forms of servitude. At the centenary of West Indian Emancipation, Sir Reginald Coupland, the leading Africanist of the times and a biographer of William Wilberforce, wrote with great optimism that, "There can be little doubt that, except in remote and unsettled regions of the world beyond the present reach of civilised opinion, the final eradication of the slave system is assured in no long space of time."

Some 40 years later, a mature U.N. with its 'plethora of international agreements for the suppression of slavery' was reporting that slavery played a significant role in the societies of 17 African, 15 Asian and six Latin American countries. (Much of the information here comes from Howard Temperley's contribution to a collection of papers on Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, Longman, 1996).

A global problem

Servitude in the United States and Britain, two great bastions of freedom, is now well-documented, largely involving the exploitation of illegal migrants. The estimates of people living in outright modern slavery vary from 27 million to about 12 million. The highly-respected Anti-slavery International, formerly the Anti-Slavery Society, dating back to 1839, says 20 million. A 2005 International Labour Organisation (ILO) report says 12.3 million. Hundreds of millions more live under some sort of forced labour servitude.

The ILO Report, 'A Global Alliance against Forced Labour', estimates that there are some 350,000 forced labourers in the industrialised world. The U.N. labour agency says 2.4 million of them are victims of trafficking, and their labour generates profits of over $30 billion half of which $15.5 billion are generated in the rich states of Europe and the United States.

The organisation says forced labour is a global problem, in all regions and types of economy. Four-fifths of forced labour is exacted by private agents and most victims are women and children, the ILO says.

Slavery is still very much with us. And in our own freedom we should raise our voices for those in bondage.